Education: Year In Review 1996

Noteworthy educational news in 1996 concerned literacy efforts, the renovation of educational systems in Eastern Europe, the preparation of students for changing labour markets, the operation of schools by religious organizations, ways to improve students’ welfare, university enrollment changes, improved opportunities for women, and corruption in higher education. Among the persistent issues in the United States were: academic deficiencies of students in comparison with those from other industrialized nations; government support for parents to select their children’s schools; increasing costs of higher education; the need to connect schools to the information superhighway; drug abuse and violence in schools; and the need for training programs for unemployed and underemployed adults whose skills had become obsolete or dated.

Primary and Secondary Education

The importance of literacy education was emphasized in a study of social and economic conditions in 162 countries. The report concluded that industrialized nations should redirect aid for less-developed countries into literacy programs. According to the study’s authors, the reduction of illiteracy could empower underprivileged nations to become partners of wealthy countries and reduce the gap between rich and poor societies.

Innovative methods for promoting literacy were being adopted in various parts of the world. Following its success in Australia, a literacy project for less-privileged children, entitled First Step, was introduced for experimental use in the United Kingdom. Another approach to literacy training imported from Australia appeared in the British Link-into-Learning centres, which were designed to provide adults with sufficient reading and writing skills to obtain work and help their children with school tasks. In Uganda a program named REFLECT, which engaged learners in creating their own written materials, was credited with enabling 60% to 70% of the course participants to become literate; previous programs had achieved only 12% success. A Finger Phonics scheme that associated letter sounds with finger movements gained popularity in Canada and the U.K.

Within Russia debates ensued over the role that minority-group languages should assume in schools that had used Russian as the primary medium of instruction for more than five decades. Ever since the republics at the end of the 1980s won the right to direct their own educational systems, advocates of using local languages in schools had vied against proponents of maintaining Russian as the dominant national tongue. Provincial leaders argued that their languages would be lost if not given a key role in the curriculum.

Throughout Eastern Europe increasing numbers of youths were attending bilingual schools that offered an opportunity to study foreign languages that had been forbidden under communist regimes prior to 1989. English had become the most popular language to learn.

In his state of the union message to Congress on Jan. 23, 1996, U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton urged an educational technology initiative to improve education, proposing that every U.S. classroom be equipped with computers and connected to the Internet by the year 2000. The president also recommended that states and local districts adopt national standards to assess students’ academic progress, supported the right of parents to choose the public school of their choice, encouraged organization of charter schools, and emphasized the need for values and character education.

Although there were proposals in the U.S. Congress to reduce federal spending for education by 17%, the reductions in the bill that passed Congress totaled 9%. The 1996 bill allocated $400 million for the AmeriCorps national service program, $69.5 million less than fiscal 1995 and $417 million less than the president requested. It granted $350 million for Goals 2000 education initiatives, $22 million less than 1995 funding, and allocated $3,570,000,000 for Head Start funding, $36 million more than in 1995. Spending for programs assisting public-school children was set at $7.2 billion, $1 billion more than Republicans had sought. The total allocation for education was $25,323,000,000, compared with $26.8 billion in fiscal 1995.

A National Educational Summit, the second such conference held in the U.S., met on March 26-27, 1996, in Palisades, N.Y. Like the earlier conference in 1989, the 1996 meeting--attended by leaders in business, government, and education--focused on U.S. students’ academic deficiencies, particularly in mathematics and science, in comparison with students from other industrialized countries. Calling for improved academic achievement, the summit recommended that state and local districts establish specific standards for basic academic subjects, especially in English, science, and mathematics. Addressing the summit, President Clinton called for assessment of academic competency through standardized state competency testing in basic academic subjects. Critics of the summit, deciding its focus was too narrow, contended it should have considered broader issues, including school choice. Critics also alleged that comparisons of U.S. students’ academic achievement with those of other countries rested on invalid criteria.

In the 1996 election campaign, the Republican and Democratic platforms and positions differed on educational policy. The Republicans promised abolition of the Department of Education and an end to federal funding of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The two major parties continued to differ on "school choice" and using vouchers to provide parents with public funds for their children to attend their school of choice. While Republicans supported vouchers for both public and private schools, Democrats opposed them for private schools.

The charter school movement in the U.S. experienced continued growth in 1996, attracting support in 25 states of the U.S. as an alternative form of school organization. Though public schools, charter schools provided an alternative to those conventionally established and maintained by a local district. Charter schools exhibited the following characteristics: (1) the state authorized organizations to establish and operate charter schools and issued a waiver freeing them from many regulations governing public schools; (2) the school was "public"--that is, nonsectarian and supported by public funds; (3) the school, through its charter, was responsible for students’ academic progress; (4) the school was one of choice for educators and parents; the choice, however, was within the public, not the private, sector.

While the charter school movement gained momentum, the trend to privatize public-school operations and services experienced setbacks in 1996. The board of education of Hartford, Conn., for example, canceled its contract with Educational Alternatives, which had previously operated the district’s schools.

With regard to curriculum and instruction, constructivism continued to be popular, especially in elementary schools. Constructivism emphasized learning by problem-solving rather than by receiving information. Students constructed their own knowledge base from direct interaction with sources in the environment. Through social interaction, they actively created meaning out of their individual and group constructions of reality.

The 28th Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll for 1996 revealed public attitudes toward public schools in the U.S. According to the poll, 43% of the respondents gave their local public schools high marks, an A or B, for overall educational performance. This ranking remained consistent with previous polls in that respondents rated the performances of their local public schools higher than those of public schools nationally. In rank order, the major problems facing public schools were identified as drug abuse, lack of discipline, violence and gangs, and lack of adequate financial support.

Concern about the quality of mathematics instruction was voiced in the U.K. after tests of 13-year-olds in nine nations showed that pupils in England correctly answered only 53% of math problems, compared with 79% by pupils in Singapore. Youngsters in Taiwan and South Korea also earned high scores. The author of the study, David Reynolds of the University of Newcastle, suggested that the dominant method of teaching mathematics in England since the 1960s concentrated on the brightest pupils and neglected the others, which thereby produced overall low test results. He advocated changing to the "whole-class" teaching system used in the East Asian countries, Germany, and Switzerland, a system that challenged all pupils to reach a minimum standard of attainment.

Observers of Great Britain’s programs for training non-university-bound adolescents charged that the nation lacked adequate provisions for vocational training, so many young people seeking jobs were unable to carry out such simple tasks as basic mathematical calculations. As a result, according to critics, the economy was locked into a low-quality, low-pay production system. Advisers proposed restructuring the government’s Youth Training Scheme to emphasize communication and number skills, information technology, and other general abilities required by industry.

Computer-literacy instruction advanced in China, where urban schools were increasingly providing such training. The number of Chinese families owning personal computers rose in 1996 to more than one million, a figure expected to reach five million by the year 2000. At the same time, schools emphasized training children in the use of the abacus, the traditional method of calculating sums by moving wooden beads along wires set in a wooden frame. Proponents of the abacus asserted that in contrast to computer instruction, abacus training equipped children to visualize calculations and thereby fostered speed and accuracy in mental arithmetic.

The operation of schools by religious groups gained attention in Canada and China. Legislators in Canada’s Newfoundland province voted to eliminate from the provincial constitution its unique system of providing public funds to pay the costs of schools operated by seven Christian denominations. Critics of the vote feared that it might encourage legislatures in Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, and Saskatchewan to remove the constitutional protection for the public funding of Roman Catholic schools in those provinces. In December the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Ontario did not have to finance non-Catholic religious schools even though it had paid for Catholic schools for more than a century.

In China local communist officials introduced a policy of permitting Christian churches to operate primary schools in regions too poor to finance children’s education. To pay the cost of erecting the first of such schools in Guangdong province, Christians in the village of Baiwan solicited the aid of Hong Kong’s Christian Council to raise the $150,000 needed to build a modern four-story concrete school, furnish it, and pay teachers’ salaries. The Baiwan school offered a secular curriculum, was tuition-free, and was managed by a board composed of local Christians and non-Christians.

Following the reunification of Germany in 1990, officials in the five eastern German states sought to devise a satisfactory means of implementing the central government’s West German mandate that religious education be provided as a regular school subject. The solution in four of the states (Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia, and Mecklenburg-West Pomerania) was to offer students a choice between traditional religious instruction (Lutheranism or Roman Catholicism) as in western Germany or a nonreligious ethics course. The fifth state, Brandenburg, in 1996 created an integrated course entitled "Lifestyle, Ethics, and Religion," focusing on the comparative study of religions and philosophies rather than indoctrination in a single faith.

Steps intended to enhance students’ welfare were adopted in Japan and Israel. Japanese authorities focused attention on the issue of students’ being terrorized by classmates. Although reported incidents of bullying had declined to 7,000 by 1996, compared with 22,000 several years earlier, officials still considered pupil harassment a serious problem that called for heightened teacher vigilance and prompt disciplinary action.

In past years critics had claimed that Israel’s tradition of including eight subject fields in national diploma examinations placed too great a burden on the high-school juniors and seniors who needed to pass the tests in order to gain admission to a university. To reduce the emotional pressure on students, Israeli Education Minister Amnon Rubinstein in 1996 established a system by which an annual lottery would be held to determine which five subjects the year’s examinations would comprise and which three would be exempt. In the 1996 lottery the exempt fields were Bible, Jewish history, and mathematics. An objection to the plan was voiced by the country’s new prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who contended that failing to test students’ command of Bible and Jewish history would be ignoring Israel’s cultural roots. In response, defenders of the plan asserted that students’ high-school grades in the exempt subjects would be sufficient evidence of their knowledge in those fields.

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